The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political writers of our time a real _Romanticism of Pessimism_, as false in its absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude is most impressive to simple souls.[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work--he has taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious. The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the matter of moral perfectability. I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’, by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:-- The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors, his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion, instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself.[109] The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers, while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’ extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to belong to the life of the mind--that is what modern humanity sees. But it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.